ASEAN outlines plan against fires, haze

ASEAN outlines plan against fires, haze

SINGAPORE (AP): Now that heavy rains have doused Indonesian wildfires, Southeast Asian nations outlined a plan yesterday to catch blazes more quickly, using military planes for aerial surveillance, clearer satellite photos and international aid money for fuel and training.

It's an expensive plan, "but it's much more expensive to fight fires that are out of control," Singapore's environment minister Yeo Cheow Tong told reporters after a one-day meeting on how to avoid a repeat of last year's costly fires and cross-border haze pollution.

"A repeat of this disaster will surely aggravate the already bad regional economic situation," Yeo had told fellow ministers and officials from the nine-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Conservative estimates are that last year's disaster cost about US$4.5 billion, not counting the loss of human and animal life, plus the continuing disturbance of tourism, health costs and damage to forests up until May this year from the lingering rain forest fires on Borneo.

The United Nations Environment Program is coordinating donor countries toward a target of US$10 million to help prevent new fires and put out existing ones. Some are taking a wait-and-see attitude, because of recent rains.

However, underground peat and coal seam fires, the most difficult to extinguish, are still burning. The United States has committed part of its $6 million in anti-fire aid money to focus on those unique types of fires, and American experts are heading into the region now to assess them and give advice, officials said.

Meanwhile, new hot spots have been detected in central Sumatra, resulting in some haze drifting over Singapore.

The new Indonesian government, which has made forest fire- fighting its second priority after food, is doing all it can to quickly put out the Sumatran fires before they spread, an Indonesian official told reporters.

"For sure, it's not enough," said Effendy A. Sumardja, assistant minister for environment coordination. "That's the reason why we need the support." He said the government had allocated $4 million to fire fighting this year "but it isn't enough. Particularly nowadays, in the crisis period, I'm not sure whether the money is still there."

Within two weeks, he said, Indonesia plans to provide four military planes, and civilian and military personnel, for aerial surveillance in four provinces.

The satellite photos now in use are not detailed enough to spot fires when they first break out. Better pictures will cost more.

"A delay of half a day could result in a fire growing quite substantially," said Yeo of Singapore.

The ASEAN officials and ministers urged their governments to consider changing laws so that any landowner is presumed to be responsible when a fire breaks out on his property. Malaysia and Brunei have such so-called "presumptive clauses."

About 80 percent of the fires that burned agricultural land, grassland and rain forest in Indonesia since last year are blamed on large landowners who illegally use fire to clear away unwanted vegetation. But it is often hard to prove who set the fire, said Yeo.